General Hamilton’s politics. As early as 1798, when Napoléon first
emerged from the chaos of the French Revolution, Hamilton called him
“that unequalled conqueror from whom it is painful to detract, in whom
one would wish to find virtues worthy of his shining talents,” When
Napoléon brushed aside the feeble five-man directory that was trying to
ru.le France and made himself consul for ten years, with absolute power,
Hamilton and his Federalist friends regarded the event with a nice mix-
ture of admiration and cynicism. “After ten years of agitation, anarchy,
proscription, murder, pillage and crimes of every degree and eight years of
the must cruel and bloody wars,” wrote one Federalist, the French were
now subject to “the despotism of one man of sense, who may find it in his
interest to govern well and in his power to govern with steadfastness. . . .
General Bonaparte’s government is for the best for France . . . and he de-
serves the thanks of the world for its establishment.”
‘President Jefferson and his fellow Republicans somewhat nervously
tried to admire Bonaparte for a different reason: They hoped he was the
savior of their beloved French Revolution, which had showed signs of im-
minent collapse under the combined assaults of the crowned heads of Eu-
rope. The Jeffersonians strained their brains and syntax to look favorably
on Napoléon’s emergence.
Jefferson piously announced he hoped it was really true that “Bonaparte
had usurped the government with the intention of making it a free one.”
When Napoleon forced Austria to sign‘ the humiliating peace of
Luneville in 1801 and the battered British signed a similar semicapitula-
tion at Amiens later in the year, leaving Napoléon master of Europe, the
Republicans gloated and cheered. They maintained that the revolution
that had begun in America had triumphed and even claimed that
Napoleon had been fighting Americas battle. If the English had beaten
Bonaparte the Republicans reasoning went, London would have restored
a king to the French throne and launched a war of annihilation against
the United States.‘
Within the year, Napoléon confounded President ]efferson’s optimism
by having himself elected first consul for life and restoring the Catholic
church to all its ancient privileges in France. General Hamilton and his
fellow Federalists lost no time in roasting the discomfited Republicans.
The editorials in the New York Evening Past, many of them dictated to
William Coleman by Hamilton at the end of his long working day, were
particularly savage: “Those who admired the French Revolution as a sys-
tem of liberty are now put into the most ridiculous, whimsical and con-
temptible situation imaginable. Their great high priest Bonaparte has left
them completely in the lurch . . . The First Consul has torn the mask
from democracy and branded its forehead with infamy forever.“
Paradoxically, the Evening Post continued to praise the “tranquility and
joy” that the elevation of Bonaparte had brought to France. The Post in-
sisted, as General Hamilton often did in his letters, that it was not Americas
business to tell the people of France what kind of government they should
choose. “A government must be fitted to a nation as much as a coat to an in-
dividual . . .What may be good at Philadelphia [the U.S. capital at the time]
may be bad in Paris and ridiculous at Peterburgh”[St. Petersbu.rg].°
II
In America, as in the rest of the world, Napoléon had become a subject of
consuming interest. His taste in architecture, furniture, clothes, women,
and food were reported in omnivorous detail. Newspapers devoted
columns to telling their readers how fresh trout were caught in Lake
Geneva and rushed to the first consul’s table. For the Federalists, there
was political capital in publicizing the new Caesar’s imperial tastes. They
were mocking Napoléon’s indifference to the Republican simplicity that
President Jefferson, his penny-pinching ally George Clinton, and their
cohorts claimed was the epitome of revolutionary virtue.
Above all, Hamilton and the Federalists were pleased by the “emanci
pation of that ill-starred country from the ravages of Jacobinism.” They
did not mourn for French liberty because in their view France had never
been free. She had been ruled by a bloodthirsty atheistic mob personified
by Maximilien de Robespierre, the leader of the Jacobin Club. (The name
derived from their original meeting place, a Dominican monastery: Ja
cobin was the French name for the religious order.) The Federalists hoped
Napoleon’s usurpation had put an end to the seductive menace of the
revolution's war cry: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity “Every pious man re-
joices at the restoration of Christianity,” the Evening Post added.’
But General Hamilton did not stop worrying about France. “The spirit
of Jacobism which has almost desolated France and threatened the
whole world is now held in chains by the power of one man . . . If the
hand of the assassin [reached] Bonaparte, the monster Jacobinism
would rage with more violence than ever,” Hamilton declared at a meet-
ing of the New York Federalists. This was the political equivalent of hav-
ing your cake and eating it too. Hamilton pointed to the awesome power
of France, Supreme in Europe, with the fleets of Spain and Holland at her
beck an call. There seemed to be no nation or combination of nations
that could prevent her from achieving “universal empire " What had
President Jefferson done to meet this potential menace? He had virtually
beached the U.S. Navy and dismantled the U.S. Army, and agreed to pay
Napoleon $15 million for Louisiana. What could the President do if
Napoleon changed his mind, or was assassinated, and France decided to
take back Louisiana? Nothing.
In the spring of 1803, this unnerving idea had become more than a mere
possibility when the two-year-old peace of Amiens collapsed. Napoleon
announced he was going to invade England and dictate peace in St.
James Palace. Newspapers told how the so—called Man of Destiny was
summoning reserves from Italy, Switzerland, and Germany to assemble an
immense host, the Army of England, in the French channel ports and
Holland. Many Americans predicted an internal revolution if Napoleon
got his army ashore and the disenfranchised English masses started listen-
ing to the French siren song of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”
Commodore Thomas Truxtun’s letter to General Hamilton, deploring
]efferson’s administration and calling for a revision of the Constitution,
enclosed a copy of a long letter Truxtun had written to Senator Timothy
Pickering, analyzing the chances of Napoléon successfully invading Eng-
land. The commodore pointed out the various parts of the English coast
where an army might land and what sort of naval support they would re-
quire. Truxtun thought Napoléon’s army would take horrendous casualties
at sea and the men who survived would be stopped on the beaches. But he
was by no means certain the Corsican-born general could not succeed: “A
Short time will make manifest Whether I have Judged correctly of the
Subject,"Truxtun wrote. At stake was nothing less than the “happiness of
Nations.”
III
Hamilton and a group of moneyed Federalist friends had established the
Evening Past late in 1801. Its fine white rag paper and clean type made it
instantly superior to most of its cash-short rivals, who struggled along
with cheap blue paper and battered fonts.
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